Palette Summer school: on the idea of communities of practice

Murray Saunders

Theoretical overview: communities of practice

• Learning in work is produced through practices • A workplace can be understood as an activity

system or a community of practice• Practice produces different types of knowledge

resource • Learning processes are often ‘informal’

Learning takes place in different contexts

Alternative perspectives 2: Wenger

“A concept of practice includes both the explicit and the tacit. It includes what is said and what is left unsaid; what is represented and what is assumed. It includes the language, tools, documents, images, symbols, well defined roles, specified criteria, codified procedures, regulations, and contracts that various practices make explicit for a variety of purposes. But it also includes all the implicit relations, tacit conventions, subtle cues, untold rules of thumb, recognizable intuitions, specific perceptions, well tuned sensitivities, embodied understandings, underlying assumptions and shared world views.” [p47Wenger 1999]

Wenger on ‘practice’

• “ The concept of practice connotes doing, but not just doing in and of itself. It is doing in a historical and social context that gives structure and meaning to what we do. In this sense, practice is always social practice” [Wenger 99, p 47]

Alternative perspectives 1: Giddens on ‘practice’

• Informal learning often occurs through practice or learning about a practice. Practice is at the heart of informal learning

• Giddens’ notion of the practical refers to behaviour which is recurrent or routine i.e. happens on a day to day basis and is rooted in the normal routine of daily life. Therefore a ‘practice’ is a way of doing something, the pattern of which is reproduced in a social context [i.e. work] according to certain rules.

• A practice is recurrent or routine, rule governed behaviour• Can we say that the ‘rules’ constitute the knowledge base of

informal learning in communities of practice?

Reification!!!

Important concept because it refers to when a practice becomes a system, a procedure or even a standard: “the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness’” [Wenger p58].

Blackler’s images of work-based knowledge

• Embrained knowledge [dependent on conceptual skills and cognitive abilities]

• Embodied knowledge [action oriented likely to be only partly explicit, mostly tacit, ‘the way we do things here’]

• Encultured knowledge [refers to the process of achieving shared understandings through language, socialisation acculturation, socially constructed and negotiable]

• Embedded knowledge [resides in systemic routines {reification of practice} relationships between technologies, roles, formal procedures and emergent routines]

• Encoded knowledge [information conveyed by signs and symbols, traditional forms {hard copy} and emergent forms {electronic}

Knowledge descriptors [Blackler]

• Mediated [activity systems]• Situated [Wenger]• Provisional• Pragmatic• Contested

Learning contexts

• Immediate Informal learning needs requiring short term solutions mainly embedded in day to day practices [what kinds of knowledge resources required?]

• Project Learning needs medium term, structured, requiring formal procedural knowledge based resources, outcomes represented in written form [what kind of knowledge resources required?]

• Validated Learning is formal, structured, validated by external authority and qualified [what kinds of knowledge resources?]

• Organic Learning needs are diffused, changing, defined by a community of practice, loosely organised groups, organised at a distance

Learning in the workplace as informal or non formal learning?

• Happens everywhere• Happens any time• Outside a prescribed framework• Rarely an organised event or package• Can use all kinds of different people as a learning resource• Is undertaken ‘socially naturally’ and is not usually accredited• Usually is open ended without the specification of learning

outcomes apart from learning intentions• Can be quite close to the idea of ‘socialisation’

[see Eraut in Coffield [2000]

Practice clusters as routine

recurrent, rule governed

behaviours New members access

practices through informal learning

processesAccessing and

producing knowledge

resources through practice

Evolving practice creates new

rules as knowledge resources

Learning through work in a community of practice